Festival Junial

I hope that doesn’t translate to Junal Party…

Anyways, the Festival Junial is kind of like a month long celebration for the city of San Pedro Sula, since the day of San Pedro (Saint Peter) is near the end of June. So it’s full of parades, carnival type things, and probably general debauchery, but my host family has shielded me from this if it does indeed exist. It started a bit early this year, due to both Sampedrano futbol teams playing in the finals (read more here: España wins, España!!!)

So this week was the culmination of all of this, with roads blocked for juegos mechanicos (amusement park rides), and every kind of food stand and bootleg video place imaginable. And this doesn’t just happen in one place, it happens in several places throughout the city. The queen of all places, though, is Expocenter, where I ended up going today.

There were vendors from all over Latin America, selling Mexican sweets, Peruvian Pan Flute music by some guy named Tupac (not the rapper- I asked), and more. Lots of stores from Honduras, even hair cutting salons, temporary tattoos that last 15 days, and piercing parlors that claimed to be painfree. I will call that false advertising despite not testing the claim.

Of course, there was tons of food, which I felt safer not eating, and lots of rides, bumper cars, etc. (The last picture is of my host sister and her boyfriend on one of the rides).

My Developed Eyes

I’ve done videos in four developing countries: churches overcoming apartheid in South Africa, immigration from Mexico, poor coffee producers in the Dominican Republic, and currently a woman’s group doing education in Honduras. This trend (as well as some articles I’ve read) have led me to think about who am I, a middle class person from the United States, and how does this affect my work?

In Granta magazine, Binyavanga Wainaina, from Kenya, describes satirically “How to Write about Africa.” “Never have a picture of a well-adjusted African on the cover of your book, or in it, unless that African has won the Nobel Prize. An AK-47, prominent ribs, naked breasts: use these. (…) Taboo subjects: ordinary domestic scenes, love between Africans (unless a death is involved), references to African writers or intellectuals, mention of school-going children who are not suffering from yaws or Ebola fever or female genital mutilation.”

This demonstrates pretty clearly a case of what happens when developed world eyes look at underdeveloped places, in what some are calling “development pornography.” In many cases, it is exploitation to gain money (supposedly for a good cause). AlertNet, a service of Reuters, put out this article, Aid workers lament rise of ‘development pornography’, explaining how a picture of an emaciated famine victim often only serves to “perpetuate a colonial idea of incapable Africans waiting passively for help from their white saviours.”

I, as a middle class white male from the U.S., see a situation differently than the Honduran teenager with AIDS, living in a two room house, that I interviewed last week. How can I tell her story, instead of my interpretation of her story?

A couple things I have done have worked towards alleviating this.

First, as with Convite, I lived with one of the families featured in the video. This helped me become part of their story, so that I could understand it better. Granted, I was still an outsider, but I attempted to see from their point of view.

Second, I have tried to have people talking for themselves as much as possible. Any government official or scholar may be able to give some overall statistics, but they can not tell the true story of a person who immigrates to feed their family, as in Fuerza.

Third, I have learned to have someone from close to the same situation actually be the one to interview. This arose mainly as a problem of language barriers, but I’ve learned this extends to class barriers as well. It helps people to give a more real interview of their life. I’ve had a middle class interviewer laugh at a lower class interviewee during the interview because of their less refined language. I can’t use anything from this interview.

Fourth, in the DR, I worked with a student who was interested in making documentaries. I had experience from making other documentaries, and could share that. He had the cultural insight I lacked. He now can make other documentaries, without my help.

Will I ever be able to show the world through someone else’s eyes? No. But I do think I can do my best to reduce my developed eyes in my work

Development and Immigration

Sorry for the long time without posting. I was at the MCC Mesoamerica Retreat, in Sambo Creek (near La Ceiba). It was great- we were at a decent hotel (i.e. hot showers and air conditioning!), right on the beach. It was a good time of meeting the other MCC workers, with daily workshops on the theme of immigration. Since most people at the retreat were development workers, this shaped the conversation on immigration in some interesting ways.

First of all, a developed community will encourage people not to immigrate. Also, immigration will slow development, as people with the potential to help better the situation leave behind a less hopeful situation. One exception: education (which is development, right?) will also cause immigration, in that there are not jobs for highly educated people in underdeveloped communities.

So therefore, if community development is the basis for action, people in underdeveloped communities should not be educated, in order that they do not leave the community, and so the community will eventually become developed.

Luckily, the basis for action is not (should not be) community development. The basis must be the goal of meeting the basic human rights. How to achieve that, however, is another question.

Olancho, the Wild West, the video

Here’s the video of the skit described in the previous post… I started filming as soon as I got my wits together and realized it probably wasn’t real.

Olancho, the Wild West

I ended my last post saying I was going out to Olancho. And go I did, indeed. We left Friday night at about 8:30, in a van that?s built for short public transportation, a rapidito. It can hold upwards of 20 people, at the sacrifice of any personal space and knee room. We were 11, so we could stretch out a little bit. Around midnight come the decision to head to our final location, “It’s just two more hours.” 10 minutes later we hit unpaved road, and I fell asleep. We ended up getting there at 4:30 AM, and I sacked out for the next three hours on a mattress in a friend’s house, in San Esteban. (the photo at left is the view from in front of their house)

The next day we watched a lot of soccer, and then around noon the youth retreat started. We played soccer (and got creamed) for most of the afternoon, and then I enjoyed my first warm shower since I arrived here in Honduras.

Then came the culto, the service. It started at 8PM (remember now how tired we are, from little sleep and a lot of soccer.) During the first song, a cop car pulled into the school where the retreat was being held, with lights flashing. 2 guys in camo and rifles jumped out, as well as a guy in police clothes with a hand gun. Suddenly there were flash fireworks going off like 10 feet from me, and the cops are up on stage with their guns pointed at the head of the bass player. They hauled him off, and someone came up to say… we don?t know what just happened, but we?ll keep you informed. He was back by the second song, and the moral came out later- Jesus is coming, like a thief in the night. “And wouldn’t it just be great if Jesus came back while we were in a church service?” I have a video I started recording as soon as I realized it was probably just a skit, which I’ll post as soon as YouTube approves it. Evidently putting “gun” in the description makes it take a little longer.

The service continued with lots of singing, bible contests, and skitsuntil 10:20, when they invited the speaker (second from left, next to me) to come up. He’s from a really rough barrio outside San Pedro Sula, and is doing some pretty interesting work getting gang members to leave gangs (Joining an evangelical church is one of the very few ways of leaving a gang with your life, supposedly). He talked until 11:20, when the altar call started. I was glad to get to bed at midnight.

Sunday, we drove home, and I was instantly glad that I hadn’t known how bad the road was coming in. I couldn’t imagine driving it in the dark. The downside of doing it in the dark on the way therewas missing some beautiful scenery, an indigenous village, and great pulperias with awesome hats. Once we hit pavement, it was a smooth ride back to San Pedro, except for an hour and a half stop to watch Honduras beat Mexico in the Gold Cup!!!

Honduras

“According to the UN, the population that lives
on less than a US dollar per day in Honduras has lowered from 37.8% in
1990 to 20.7% in 2004. The goal is that it lowers to 18.9% in 2015.”
Also, about 45% of people are self employed, and 11% live off of remesas, money coming from family who have immigrated, likely to the US.

This comes from a two page spread today in the newspaper, on Honduras’ progress with the United Nation’s Millenium Goals. It’s a nice overview of where the country is now, and it’s looking better, but still not good. Here’s the link in Spanish, for those of you so inclined, and a probably bad translation in English, and another shorter article in English.
I find it interesting that an article like this is published here, that the poverty is so readily acknowledged. Also, it has a definite leftist tone that seems unusual for political climate here.

Here are two quotes I thought particularly interesting:

• “What has happened is that the rich ones have
  always lived at the cost of the poor men, that is the truth.” -Juan Ramon Martinez, Analyst
• “The parties have always governed
  for the powerful classes of the country “. -Doris GutiÈrrez, Deputy UD

I think it’s great that these ideas are out there, and that people are aware of these issues. The article also talks about the gap between the rich and the poor, and shows the difference is salary that men and women says.
It’s a pretty thorough look at the current situation of Honduras.

This weekend, I’m headed out to Olancho, which I’m hoping reminds me of my campo home in the DR. (Just look at the mountains!)

Freedom of the Press

So while what I’m sure Fox has dubbed “War on Free of Speech” in Venezuela rages on, a similar “Attack on the Press” is going in Honduras. Honduran President Manuel (Mel) Zelaya is currently putting himself on air on every Honduras based radio and television outlet for 2 hours daily. This started last Monday, and is going to go on for a minimum of 10 days. (CNN Article)

Mel is doing this in response to what he considers a media that is overly critical of him. I haven’t been here long enough to gauge the accuracy of that, so maybe it’s true.
But as far as freedom of the press goes, I realized something interesting.
We are not willing to get news from people we elect, whose goal is (should be) the people. Yet we are more willing to listen to what a company, whose goal is to make money, and in which we have absolutely no say. This seems backwards.

I am definitely not advocating getting rid of a free press, and depending on the government for news. However, I think we have too much faith in the free press. Just as we see the vested interests in official propoganda from governements, we need to learn to see the vested interests of other news channels.

On a slightly different note, the rains of May finally arrived, on the last day of May. In the past, rains came much earlier, but due to deforestation and other ecological problems, rain has been coming later and later every year.
I’m just glad that there isn’t as much dust, and that the sky today is blue and free from the smoke (see my post on burning) and haze that has been making blue skies impossible to get in my outside shots. And it’s definitely feeling a lot less hot here.